Keisuke Honda scored for Victory on his debut but the side still lost to City in the Melbourne derby.
Photograph: Daniel Pockett/AAP

The stage was set. One of the biggest names to ever play Australian domestic football. An unprecedented global audience looking on with a media entourage to match. Just over 40,000 expectant fans packed inside Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium, the name itself suggestive of wonder or astonishment. Like Dwight Yorke’s acrobatic opener in the inaugural Big Blue or Tim Cahill’s sumptuous 40-yard screamer on his return to Australia, sometimes – just sometimes – the reality lives up to, or even exceeds, the hype.

“Keisuke Honda marks dream A-League debut with goal in the Melbourne derby”. It’s the headline that deserved to be written. Not just for marketers, but for all Australian football fans.

After a 166-day wait, just two games into the 135-game regular season, Mark Bosnich was apoplectic in the Fox Sports studios. Robbie Slater too forgot the official broadcaster’s memo to defend the VAR system.

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Just one game later more ugly heads appeared. As if the hound of Hades lay with a hydra, this inconceivably hideous thing slunk back into our loungerooms, to tread faeces into our plush carpets.

In plain English, they hung him out to dry. But after countless errors during last season, either of judgment or application of the VAR system, fans have every right to wonder how precisely it is that VAR 2.0 has evolved.

Referee Kurt Ams was hung out to dry by the FFA after his mistake in the Melbourne derby. Photograph: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images

Kevin Muscat was a picture of relative serendipity at the press conference; mindful perhaps that VAR had a not insignificant hand in his side’s A-League championship last season. But the Victory coach made the reasonable observation that rather than a torturous descent into debating the minutiae of subjective interpretation, “common sense” surely should have prevailed.

So how do you legislate for common sense? What are the guidelines or processes for communication between the on-field referee and the VAR centre? Who has, or should have, the ultimate responsibility for or jurisdiction over any given decision?

Ahead of its introduction last season, FFA was at great pains to suggest the VAR would not “re-referee” games – ultimate responsibility lay with the man in the middle. It was a mechanism simply to aid the referee by correcting “clear and obvious errors”, applicable in only four match circumstances: goals, penalties, red cards and cases of mistaken identity. Simple.

But here’s the rub. How do you legislate in black and white when handed guidelines that are couched in shades of grey?

What constitutes a “clear and obvious error”? This isn’t DRS in cricket, where a decision, however imperfect, is at least backed by the laws of physics and military grade object-tracking technology.

In a sport that has spent over a century trying to uphold that the referee’s decision must always be respected, a post-match finding by a governing body that rules that one individual referee has been at fault – single-handedly ruining one of the most important games of the season – can never be an acceptable conclusion.

For VAR to work it needs to aid a referee, not cripple them under its burden. If a referee makes a poor on-field judgement then the system is at fault, and the processes or lack of failsafes that allowed that outcome to occur must be held to intense scrutiny.

This is, of course, not a unique issue for Australian football, which prompts even more questions.

When Australia elected to become the first canary sent down the VAR mineshafts what support did it receive from Fifa or the International Football Association Board in doing so? Was there a financial component to incentivise the A-League becoming the first professional top tier league in the world to adopt the controversial technology? Was there an educational component, a best practices manual rolled out by the Dutch football association that first started investigating “Refereeing 2.0” in 2010? And if so, did this occur?

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Even after the staff member whose responsibility it was to oversee the smooth application and rollout of VAR across the A-League was let go midway through last season amid FFA-club ructions and austerity measures at head office, over the five-month off-season what logistical support, what training, what financial support to fund the upskilling of existing referees and VARs was provided by Fifa, or indeed, taken up by the FFA?

Last season Shaun Evans was the villain. Already after one round of A-League action it’s Ams in the doghouse. For fans of either the Newcastle Jets or Wellington Phoenix, Daniel Elder’s three separate VAR-related decisions (or non-decisions), including a penalty for the kind of shirt tug that happens inside the box on 50+ occasions every weekend, were equally unfathomable.

And yet, after all this, the chief travesty of the opening round is that we should be talking about how one of the finest footballers that ever graced an Australian domestic football match came, saw, and conquered, almost on demand in front of a packed stadium, amid a buoyant atmosphere of colour and noise.